Forcing Multisampling/FSAA (ATI card in Wine)?

[6667d4a900cd7Tricky]

Lol man, that was a completely different computer. And like I said, five years ago. Sticking with the practical solutions for now.

[6667d4a900e19Zeebok]

Temp Fix - Cross your eyes just a little bit so the edges of everything is a little blurry

Out of curiosity what is the AMD/ATI chip you are working with right now?

[6667d4a901325Olfred]

Sticking with the practical solutions for now.

Well with the thing I said you could at least have a practical solution as a "home setup", depending on the laptop.

[6667d4a9016a4Tricky]

Temp Fix - Cross your eyes just a little bit so the edges of everything is a little blurry

Out of curiosity what is the AMD/ATI chip you are working with right now?

I don't need to cross my eyes, I just take off my glasses.. 

The chipset is called RS600, or 'x1250'

Alright.. little update.. seems like I was running Gallium (I keep accidentally writing Beryllium for some reason) all along. It's been included in Ubuntu since shortly after I stopped using it a couple years ago, which explains why I've heard so little about it. But the guys helping me figure this out (well, they're doing most of the figuring), came across unrelated but serious error in *all* my hardware accelertion. I may even have none. 

That I'm already running Gallium is a very good thing. I've read about it and parts of it are specifically meant for mobile Radeons like mine. So, I'm hoping good things. The card will never run as well as it did under Windows, but a performance increase of even 40% or so could make a big difference for a lot of old games like SS2.

So stay tuned for another episode of WTF is he talking about? 

[6667d4a901881voodoo47]

actually, I know. the x1250 is a second-gen dx9b (sm2.0) card, and official driver support has been dropped long ago, both for linux and windows - no surprise ubuntu has an opensource alternative. I would expect it to work decently, if I remember correctly, those old cards are documented pretty well - expect around 3/4 of windows performance when running native opengl games (RTCW).

a lot of slowness comes from using wine, of course.

[6667d4a901a68Olfred]

I get most of the stuff you are talking about. I'm just not familiar with linux.
Tried it for some time and well.... Windows does a good enough job and working with linux always ends in some kind of hassle for certain things :p

In CRT days a friend of mine had a screen which blurred a bit. Somehow it was the perfect kind of blur. Everything looked smooth while maintaining a very good degree of sharpness.

[6667d4a901e49Tricky]

Yeah. I wouldn't want to be stuck with Linux, but with an old laptop and no remaining Windows Vista key, that's just how it has to be. I'm not going to splash out on a machine I'm likely replacing before the year is over.

actually, I know. the x1250 is a second-gen dx9b (sm2.0) card, and official driver support has been dropped long ago, both for linux and windows - no surprise ubuntu has an opensource alternative. I would expect it to work decently, if I remember correctly, those old cards are documented pretty well - expect around 3/4 of windows performance when running native opengl games (RTCW).

a lot of slowness comes from using wine, of course.

That's the impression I'm getting too. Some slowness does come from Wine (although in some cases the API is simpler and actually runs faster than Windows) and some other slowness can probably attributed to my GPU being ATI, in spite of Gallium's broad support for these older cards. Still.. I've seen how fast similar computers to mine run Nvidia and Ati cards. I fully expected that 3/4 performance and usability, but what I got instead is a little closer to 10%. But I'm working on that.

Anyhow, last night I consulted a few Linux gurus. I ended messing something up and I had to reinstall a lot of things. Still working on fixing that, but it seems to have already re-enabled hardware acceleration. I just haven't had the chance to try it out yet on a game.

[6667d4a902072Tricky]

Well, thanks to that system crash and the resulting reinstall, things are working the way they should again. One of the main differences is that I've chosen to run XUbuntu 12.04 and not the beta 13.04. I'm not sure if 13.04 had anything to do with my problems, but 12.04 is a long-term support release that has been tested and fixed up extensively. I can go on and pretend that will make my life a little better. 

Ironically enough after all this time and effort, the reason why I started out this thread, multisampling, still isn't working. But I can still retry the Wine registry edits I read about and see if that makes a difference. More importantly *I don't really care about it*, now that I can actually play the game at high resolutions. The blocky edges just become less of an irritation.

Also while my framerate has increased to a normal 25 ~ 60 rate in the game at high resolutions (I can't actually tell how much it is in SS2, just take my word for it that it's smooth), I do seem to suffer from some irregular stutters and jittering. I think it may have something to do with the forced framerates of tft screens. I saw a related setting in cam_ext.cfg, so I will look into that later.

Everyone, thanks for all the tips, idle conversation and moral support! Not just in this thread, but the others too.

[6667d4a9021a0Zeebok]

Yay! 13.04 isn't in beta at this point, but my experience with it is that with newer hardware it is ridiculously quick and stable. Been playing Half Life 2 on it really well actually. It has its kinks for sure but it is certainly getting to a nice state. Awesome news on getting it playable though

[6667d4a9022e3Tricky]

Thanks! I was actually struggling to find the right word there. It's not 'in beta', but the update manager won't just grab it yet either (not without a few custom settings at least). I'm not sure what that's called.. in limbo? 

I'm not sure if I want to upgrade to 13.04. One of the reasons I threw the Unity desktop manager out was, besides all the needless hardware acceleration, that it was actually glitching all over the place. I wonder now if switching to Xfce only masked the underlying problem.. 

Either way, it's been dealt with. Good riddance.

[6667d4a9023d0Olfred]

I think the long time support releases only grab long time support stuff

[6667d4a9024e5Tricky]

That is true. But at some point, my guess is when the long term support is over, the package manager ceases to update and all you can do is to select the next major release of Ubuntu. I know this because I installed 13.04 from a 9.10 disc (that sounds bothersome, but I had no DVD's left to burn anything bigger than 9.10, which fitted on a CD). Takes about a quarter of a day to upgrade from there.

[6667d4a9025f2Olfred]

Aren't there live system installation where you have like nothing really important on the CD and everything for the installation is going to be downloaded then.

But well, shouldn't make a big difference.

[6667d4a9027a7Tricky]

Yes, that is more or less what I did. Let's see, what were those complications with that again..

Well first of all, all installation discs for Ubuntu are also live discs these days. My main problem with that was that I was out of DVDs. Older versions of Ubuntu still fit on a single CD, and I still had a couple of those laying around.

Yet still, you are correct. There are also minimized installations of Ubuntu 13.04, which are trimmed of most software and drivers. I wasn't sure if using that was a good idea at the time, so I did ask about it just before I migrated this laptop to Ubuntu. I was told specifically NOT to try installing such a CD on a not-so common laptop.

It's perfectly possible to install it with such a minimized CD, you just have to be absolutely certain that all the key integrated hardware is also supported by it, such as the network card driver you need to download the rest of the installation. There is simply too much weird hardware like that in a laptop. So, at the time I really wasn't sure enough on the exact model number of this laptop and the network card inside (although I did have a quick look under the hood), so I decided not to take that chance.

Migrating from 9.10 to 13.10 might have taken more time, but I was happier not to having to worry about those drivers.

[6667d4a9028d3Olfred]

Yeah, laptop hardware can be a total pain in the ass.
Currently I have two locations for living and decided to buy a gaming laptop.
Now I am stuck with a network card which has a driver that is total shit. My good advice, never buy any of this killer network crap. If you really want stable and good performance go with an intel network card. They are reliable and have good drivers on all common OSs.

[6667d4a902a23Zeebok]

IBM/Lenovo laptops are a good choice as well; not sure about their availability worldwide. My Lenovo s405 works very nicely out of the box in 13.04 which makes me realize I should put SS2 on it for away from home fun!